Taking Recycling Rules to the Next (Federal) Level
Chellie Pingree cannot imagine throwing perfectly good clothing away. The idea, in fact, is practically anathema to her.
'I come from the state of Maine; I represent Maine,' the Democratic congresswoman said. 'We're a very thrifty, Yankee kind of culture that loves nothing more than buying clothes in a thrift shop, passing down a good wool shirt to a family member or, you know, having your boots resoled. It's second nature to me.'
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Little could prepare her, even as ranking member of the House Appropriations Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Subcommittee, for the knowledge of how much textile waste—from apparel, yes, but also footwear, carpets and household linens—gets landfilled or incinerated in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the amount of textile waste generated by the nation nearly doubled from 9.5 million tons in 2000 to 17 million tons in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available. Of that, only 14.7 percent was recycled.
When Pingree began pitching the idea of a Congressional Slow Fashion Caucus to tackle the onslaught of cheap and low-quality clothing she blames for the trend, her fellow lawmakers initially balked. Still, she kept at it, filling the ranks of what is now a growing coalition.
'People were like, 'Sorry, I don't care about clothes,'' she said. 'But the more I described to both male and female members the volume of clothing we're throwing out, the impact of foreign manufacturing and the impact on the environment, I found that it's a topic that interested people more than they realized. Our government doesn't really have a very good organizational structure for measuring the amount of waste and doing something about it. But it's not to say that we shouldn't.'
That the U.S. government needs to take a heavier hand in tackling the scourge of textile waste is why Pingree led a request to the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, to produce what ended up being hailed as the first federal report on fast-fashion pollution in December. The agency put its findings, titled 'Textile Waste: Federal Entities Should Collaborate on Reduction and Recycling Efforts,' in less sound-bitey terms, but the sentiment still held.
The increasing dominance of fast fashion's high-turnover use-and-dispose business model, GAO said, has ramped up the production of clothing waste. But so has the dearth of centralized systems for collecting, sorting and grading discarded textiles for recycling or to retain their value on the secondhand market.
'It's not only that more textiles are being produced but also that these are fabrics that aren't necessarily of the highest quality, so they're usually not going to be recycled,' said Alfredo Gomez, director at GAO. 'Or they may have synthetic fibers, which also have difficulty, as we learned, in the recycling process.'
The problem is figuring out who's responsible. While that's a perennial issue whenever there are multiple actors in a value chain, the United States is an expansive and fragmented nation governed by a patchwork of federal, regional and local policies. Textiles that are chucked into household trash enter the municipal waste stream, leaving cities and counties to ultimately decide what gets picked up at the curb for processing or recycling. But state leadership also has its say, with Massachusetts banning textiles from disposal or incineration in 2022, California requiring apparel and textile producers to fund and implement a statewide program to reuse, repair and recycle their products by 2026 and both New York and Washington cueing up similar moves of their own.
'Traditionally, waste is managed at the local level, so cities and counties and local government are the ones contracting with the haulers and getting the materials out of people's homes,' said Joanne Brasch, director of policy and outreach at the California Product Stewardship Council, a nonprofit that focuses on extended producer responsibility, better known by the acronym EPR. 'And it gets elevated to the state level when the product is problematic or big enough of a volume that the local government can't figure it out on their own. And that's kind of what happened to textiles. It was just too complicated.'
Brasch would argue that a state approach is preferable because it allows for more transparency and enforcement. At the same time, federal entities are responsible not only for defining national strategies but also for funding research, conducting education and outreach and deploying grants to states, municipalities and other downstream stakeholders. The EPA, for instance, finalized in 2021 a plan to achieve a 50 percent nationwide recycling rate, including for textiles, by leveraging a bipartisan infrastructure deal that earmarked $350 million for solid waste and recycling grants.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, under the Department of Commerce, developed reference data to help textile sorters who use near-infrared spectroscopy to sort castoff clothing. And the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, as part of the Department of Energy, funds the Reducing Embodied-energy And Decreasing Emissions manufacturing institute—REMADE for short—and its efforts to bolster textile circularity.
Even so, federal efforts involving textile waste tend to be implemented in isolation, with varying approaches and limited interagency collaboration, the GAO report said. Or, as Gomez put it, 'there's no one in charge.' There's also the fact that information on possible federal funding sources for advancing textile recycling for other stakeholders, including municipalities and nonprofit organizations, is rarely readily accessible.
GAO proposed that the six federal entities it looked at—the EPA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of State and the Department of Energy—coordinate on their work through an interagency mechanism that 'follows leading practices,' perhaps at the behest and direction of Congress to 'take federal action.'
While the organizations agreed with GAO's findings, they also pushed back at its recommendation to 'form an interagency coordinating group,' which Gomez said wasn't what the report had suggested, since the 'mechanism' could take the form of memorandums of understanding, working groups or charters.
'So that's what we call a partial disagreement,' he said. 'Moving forward, we will be tracking their actions and then updating them on our website. Sometimes Congress holds agencies accountable by holding hearings or wanting to know if the agencies have implemented GAO's recommendations. But we've issued the report to the people that asked for it, so it's now in their hands.'
While states and municipalities can take initial steps to wrestle with the problem of textile waste, any long-term success will be limited without a cohesive federal mandate that pairs harmonized regulation with large-scale incentives, said Rachel Kibbe, CEO of American Circular Textiles, an industry lobbying group that includes reuse, resale and recycling stalwarts such as Circ, ThredUp, The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective and USAgain.
'The fragmented approach we've seen with plastics has demonstrated that state-level policies often struggle to scale effectively, leading to inconsistent enforcement, compliance challenges, consumer confusion and limited infrastructure investment,' she said. 'This is especially true because we see EPR bills starting with our largest economies in the U.S. We are embarking on collecting massive amounts of textiles that we neither have the infrastructure nor the markets to handle yet.'
ACT was behind a provision in the 2024 bill known as the Americas Trade and Investment Act, a.k.a. the Americas Act, that would appropriate more than $14 billion in grants, loans and credits to foster domestic textile circular innovation and development. It's the first-time textile circularity has been considered at this kind of scale, Kibbe said. Tying it with onshoring and nearshoring efforts also taps into the second Trump administration's 'America First' agenda, making it less a matter for partisan debate.
She also supports bills that she wasn't directly involved in, such as the Strategies to Eliminate Waste and Accelerate Recycling Development, or STEWARD, which was introduced in the Senate in February and seeks to improve recycling capabilities across various materials, including textiles. Passing this would shore up the nation's recycling and composting infrastructure in rural and underserved areas and allow greater accessibility and transparency of waste management data.
'Efforts like California's SB 707 and other state efforts are important catalysts, but to drive systemic change, we need federal leadership that aligns policies, streamlines regulations and funds scaleable solutions,' she said. 'This includes incentives for circular design, recycling infrastructure and reshoring textile manufacturing, which will not only address waste but also support economic growth and supply chain resilience.'
For Michelle Gabriel, director of the master's program in sustainable fashion at IE College New York, textile waste is both an issue of responsibility and of infrastructure. Gabriel was a member of a task force that examined how New York City could reduce the environmental impact of the textile-based goods it purchased, used and disposed of based on Local Law 112, which went into effect in 2022.
The law, as far as Gabriel and her team could tell, is the first of its kind within the United States. In a report published in August, they argued that it should be viewed as an 'important foundational step' to advancing textile sustainability and procurement efforts by the city and the broader textile industry.
It was almost immediately, however, that they ran into a singular problem: bad and missing data.
'When we received all the data from the city, it was almost unusable, because there was no material content, among other things,' Gabriel said. 'So we had to develop this risk assessment process based on a combination of what we know generally about textiles globally and what we can infer about practices from each agency's limited descriptions of their textile-based purchases.' This meant everything from uniforms to office carpeting.
What the task force found was that cities have unique opportunities to better manage their environmental and procurement policies by investing in infrastructure that will eventually drive down the costs of those activities, even though the assumptions it made in the absence of 'all those intricacies' mean it would have to home in on each agency or even department to make targeted recommendations, she added. The fact that few end-of-life solutions existed despite how resource intensive and polluting it is to create textiles, particularly in the case of synthetics, however, was a major throughline. And that's something that's going to take everyone at every level to change.
'We need the federal and state governments to enact EPR laws which more equitably redistribute the responsibility of textile waste from exclusively local municipalities to include producing firms,' Gabriel said. 'We need local governments to rethink the costs of and incentives for generating waste within their communities: increasing the costs of landfill tipping fees to fund the currently externalized costs to communities for the management of such unbridled waste and at the same time disincentivize out-of-sight, out-of-mind tossing of 'waste' that comes with laughably low fees. We need local, state and federal governments to aggressively invest in the necessary infrastructure to divert textile waste from landfill for use in more circular economies, which can contribute meaningfully to textile-to-textile recycling and other novel applications.'
There's also the option to not legislate at all, but experts say that leaving it to businesses to come up with solutions on their own without regulatory carrots or sticks may not bear the same results. They include Phil White, co-founder and chief strategy officer at social innovation agency Grounded World, who said that it's 'weirdly enough' more cost-effective to continue to create, take, make and discard, than it is to build a reverse logistics or infrastructure to help promote circularity. What that has also led to is the phenomenon of 'donation dumping' where unwanted garments get shipped off to countries such as Chile or Ghana, where decaying textiles pile up in collapse-prone mounds, clog up waterways or otherwise fuse into the terrain.
'That's the really strange thing: even though everybody understands the need for circularity and everyone sees the value, including many brands that are starting to commercialize resell and reuse, it's still cheaper, to quite a large extent, to stick to the current linear production and send it to a landfill, incinerator or another country than it is to build a reverse supply chain,' he said. 'So that's the nut that we need to crack. That's the tension in the industry right now.'
Congresswoman Pingree, for one, is a fan of EPR and how it puts the responsibility for managing textile waste on its producers. And she intends to pull whatever levers she can find to pass legislation or include language in appropriations bills to push for whatever she can.
'Right now, it's a system where a manufacturer can kind of do anything they want, and then basically the taxpayers, the municipalities have to deal with the waste and the cost of the cleanup,' she said. 'I hope that over time, we're really focusing on how to change the system for many parts of our waste stream, but clothing seems like a prime one.'
This article was published in SJ's Sustainability Report. To download the full report, click here.
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